Burnsy talks to Emily Clixby from the Hull and East Yorkshire branch of Gig Buddies, which helps people find new friends to attend social events.

Stop sniggering at the back! This isn’t smut, it’s a serious piece about social hygiene by our phwoar! missus! correspondent Angus Young.

Had he still been with us, I think spending an hour or two having a natter with Cyril Bibby would have been time well spent. Educator, biologist, author, poet and an authority on limericks, he is also now regarded as one of Britain’s first sexologists.

Born in 1914, he was brought up as part of a family of eight children in Liverpool before going to Cambridge University to study natural sciences. After graduating, he taught science and biology initially at a school in his home city before moving to a new teaching job at Chesterfield Grammar School which didn’t last long.

In a 1981 interview, he explained how he ended up joining the government’s British Social Hygiene Council in 1941. “This was an interesting situation. I was without a job. In fact I had been sacked from my job in a grammar school because of my political (Socialist) and anti-war activities and I was perusing papers for any job that would bring in something to keep the wolves from the door. There wasn’t a social security system in those days.

“I saw an advertisement for an education officer with a range of attributes; knowledge of biology – there were thousands of better biologists than me able to lecture fairly well but I knew but I knew I could; able to write simply -I think I could; persona grata with trade unions and labour organisations – which I was and I just thought: ‘My God, that’s me. I didn’t think I had the slightest chance but I wrote and applied.’”

The BSHC had been founded during the First World War to educate people about venereal diseases. Soon after Bibby joined, it was amalgamated with the Central Council for Health Education but he would continue his role in promoting better understanding of the biological elements of health education. He would recall later: “One of the earliest things I did was to manoeuvre the need to get the various existing pamphlets re-written because I didn’t think they were terribly good. Then there was giving talks in schools and factories.”

The Council oversaw a rapid roll-out of sex education across the country with officers like Bibby working with a regional network of medical officers, education officials, leaders of youth organisations and major employers.

Wartime allowed him to pursue a more radical agenda towards getting messages about sex, contraception and communicable diseases across to the masses. “Nobody wanted to waste manpower then and the degree of freedom one had to draw up plans was remarkable and was exhilarating.” he said.

His personal lightbulb moment came at a meeting where he was addressing a gathering of local biology teachers. “One said: ‘Well at our school, we deal with this matter perfectly satisfactorily. We tell all our children about the sexual organs of a rabbit and the breeding and so forth and then we tell them the organs in humans are the same.’ I can recall replying: ‘Well, that’s absolutely fine if your aim is to persuade children to grow up so that they behave sexually as rabbits do with the same promiscuity and the same breeding habits.’ At that, the meeting rather quivered for a moment. I happened to hold a very high view of sex, that it was important to build into the very fabric of sex education at every stage and understanding that homo sapiens is a rather different create from a rabbit, capable of much else and that therefore attitudes and sentiments  and a feeling of responsibility and self-discipline were necessary too.”

Bibby’s message was simple: yes, sex is great when those natural urges start to kick in but it should also be a lifelong joy if you approach it right. During his work with the Council he wrote over 300 information pamphlets, delivered hundreds of lectures and even featured in regular radio broadcasts on the subject. He later wrote both academic and children’s books on sex education and the workings of the human body.

Many of these were written after he moved to Hull in 1959 (we were wondering when Hull would come into this – Ed.) to become principal of the city’s College of Education, later to become Hull College of Higher Education and now known simply as Hull College. He remained at the college until retiring in 1977.

His biography of Victorian biologist and anthropologist T.H. Huxley is still regarded as the definitive work on the English scientist who championed Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution while he revealed another personal passion in 1978 in a book called The Art of the Limerick in which he examines the history of the five-line form of poetry. As well as featuring 750 limericks penned by others, he also adds 200 of his own. Reading the book, it’s fun to imagine Bibby sitting at his college principal’s desk conjuring up limericks while at the same time, in another academic institution in Hull, Philip Larkin pondering over the next line in a new poem currently under construction.

Bibby died in 1987 but his legacy lives on in Hull in a charitable trust he bequeathed along with his late wife Frances which offers grants to elderly disabled people living in the city. 

Angus Young

Actor Colin Hurley is playing Duncan in the new Hull Truck production of Macbeth. Here’s what else is currently pushing his buttons.

Hull Tour Guide Paul Schofield has a wander through an often overlooked art trail in the city.

Admit it, it’s the question you’ve been asking yourself for yonks. Well now our prussian glassware correspondent Angus Young finally has the fascinating answer.

East Prussia, 1763. A group of men gather for a candle-lit dinner in a grand town house in Konigsberg, a port city on the south-east corner of the Baltic Sea. The house is almost certainly the home of Immanuel Kant. Born in Konigsberg, he’s a tutor at the city’s university and an influential philosopher who would become one of the great intellectuals in the Age of Enlightenment.

As the evening draws to a close, a single tall champagne glass is passed around the guests. It features seven names in diamond engraving and an inscription which reads: “Secrecy in love and sincerity in Friendship. All happy together notwithstanding what happen’d in the World” There’s also a date: “August of 30th 1763”.

The names are of those present, headed by Kant himself. The name below is Antony Schorn, the son of a wealthy wine merchant from the nearby town of Braunsberg. A third name – Joseph P – remains a mystery to this day, not helped by most of the engraved surname having worn away over the centuries. However, the remaining four names – Joseph Green, Robert Motherby, John Chappell and Charles Staniforth – are still perfectly legible. All four were from Hull.

Their presence – both at the dinner and on what is now known as the Kant Glass and held in a private collection – reflects the historic trading links between Hull and the Baltic port. Green was a Baltic merchant who hailed from a Hull shipping family. His brother Philip was one of Hull’s most successful late 18th century shipowners, owning the first vessel to enter the Dock (later Queen’s Dock) in 1778. However unlike Philip who lived in a huge house in George Street (the former Hull YPI building), Joseph eventually settled in Konigsberg where he continued overseeing a merchant business trading in grains, coal and herring as well as manufactured goods as well as acting as an agent for other merchants back in Hull.

As well as business, the attractions of the Baltic port city were obvious. Four times the size of Hull, it was the cosmopolitan and sophisticated capital of East Prussia, boasting a cathedral as well as a new university. Motherby was Green’s junior business partner, having arrived in Konigsberg from Hull as a teenager following in the footsteps of his elder brother who worked in the city as a physician. Their firm Green, Motherby & Co. would eventually manage Kant’s finances which included an investment in the company.

Hull-born Chappell didn’t live in Konigsberg but was a regular visitor, captaining ships operating between the two ports. Typically, West Riding cloth and Derbyshire lead was shipped from Hull while yarn, flax and hemp were common cargo on the return voyage. At the time, between 15 and 20 ships regularly sailed between the two. Staniforth completed the line-up from Hull. Another wealthy merchant, he divided his time between his home city and London and became a brother-in-law to Joseph Green.

The engraved glass and its inscription together with a repair to its slender stem continues to fascinate experts well over two centuries since it was made. It’s believed to have been made in England and specially shipped to Konigsberg for the occasion, with either by Green or Staniforth footing the bill.  The average quality of the inscription work suggests to antique glassware expert Simon Wain-Hobson that it might have even been a DIY job, He also suggests topics of conversation that night would have included the recent conclusion of The Seven Years War in Europe. The date on the glass certainly fits this theory.

“Possibly these seven men found themselves at dinner in one of their Konigsberg houses ‘all happy together’ where they exchange horror stories of close shaves, bankruptcy and ruin. No doubt they toasted their lucky escape,” he said. “Maybe a member of the party took one of the glasses and started to inscribe it. Others added their lines and names, with more or less success, depending on blood alcohol levels. Maybe the glass was broken that evening, which for some was a lucky omen – an 18th century custom. As the Kant glass was handed down directly within the  Motherby family from 1763 to 2008, Robert Motherby was probably the main culprit.”

The remaining mystery is the phrase ‘Secrecy in Love’. According to Christine Battersby, Emeritus Professor at the University of Warwick, it echoes a similar line in a well-known 17th satirical poem. However, there’s also a possibility it could be a nod to the lasting friendship between Green and Kant. Neither man married and a 2001 biography of the philosopher stated “Green’s effect upon Kant cannot be overestimated”. At this distance, it’s impossible to say they were secret lovers in an age when such relationships were rarely made public but, equally, it’s a scenario that can’t be discounted.

Angus Young

Claire is a train driver. She drives actual trains! And we guarantee you can’t watch this film without wanting to become a train driver too.

Friend of the Big Malarkey writer Helen Rutter tells us about the locations that fire her imagination.

There’s a new production of Macbeth at Hull Truck, so Burnsy sat down with actor Benjamin Wilson – who plays Ross in the play – to talk everything from the Bard to Die Hard.

Last week it was James Bond, this week it’s Mytholmroyd’s favourite son, reports our bilblioteca enrolment correspondent Angus Young.

Thanks to a recent discovery at Hull Central Library, we now know that Sean Connery was a bit of a bookworm. During a recent tidy-up, a copy of a library card application form filled out by the James Bond star was discovered in an archive. The actor signed up to be a library member in 1959 while performing in a touring show at the nearby New Theatre. Sleuths at the Hull History Centre later confirmed the show in question was  a play called The Seashell in which he starred alongside Dame Sybil Thorndike. However, the future 007 wasn’t the only famous library card carrier in Hull in the 1950s.

Nine years before Connery’s theatrical pit-stop, 19-year-old Ted Hughes arrived at RAF Sutton-on-Hull (where Bransholme’s North Point shopping centre stands today) to be trained as a ground wireless mechanic as part of his National Service. Once fully trained, he was transferred to a permanent posting at RAF Patrington where he was deployed to monitor and maintain radio equipment that allowed ground radar controllers to communicate with RAF night fighter pilots.

If the Russians were planning a Cold War bombing raid on Britain, the teenager from a small village near Hebden Bridge was going to be among the first to know about it. Fortunately for him and us, such a scenario never played out. Instead, as he famously recalled in a later interview, all he did in Patrington was “read and re-read Shakespeare and watch the grass grow”.

Spending long periods on his own in a remote shed full of listening devices, Hughes also apparently practiced memorising the works of poet W.B Yeats. According to Dr James Underwood, a lecturer in modern and contemporary literature at the University of Huddersfield, his time in Holderness was crucial in shaping his later work which eventually led Hughes to becoming poet laureate in 1984. “At the very least, Patrington was important to Hughes because the undemanding, solitary, often nocturnal nature of his work there gave him time for reading, writing and developing,” he said.

Hughes also worked at a small brick-built radar hut in Sunk Island similar to the one which recently toppled off a crumbling clifftop at Tunstall and regularly explored the surrounding landscape by bike. In his spare time, he took the bus or train into Hull to quench his literary thirst by stocking up on new material from the city’s main library.

Although there is no surviving record of his library membership, Hughes’ own autobiographical notes suggest these trips were made on a regular basis. Dr Underwood believes his library visits allowed Hughes the freedom to explore literature on his own terms instead of being influenced by studying at university. “With two years well away from curricula, from guided reading, away from tutorials and weekly essays, Hughes’ unorthodox personal and poetic identity crystallised, and he arrived at Cambridge in October 1951 already resistant to what he found there, and already willing to engage in culture wars.”

A poem titled Song written in Patrington was later published in his celebrated 1957 collection The Hawk in the Rain while another highly-regarded poem called Mayday in Holderness was written two years later, drawing on his National Service days to paint an evocative picture of the East Yorkshire landscape and the Humber estuary.

Here’s an excerpt:

From Hull’s sunset smudge

Humber is melting eastwards, my south skyline:

A loaded single vein, it drains

The effort of the inert North

Today, Hughes’ association with Patrington and the surrounding countryside is marked by a six-mile walk around the village and Patrington Haven taking in sites associated with the late poet who died in 1998.

Angus Young

NOTE: Should you feel all inspired to follow in Ted’s shoes and join Hull Libraires, you can do it here: https://www.hulllibraries.co.uk/borrowing/join-the-library

Actor Simon Trinder – currently playing MacDuff in Macbeth at Hull Truck – talks us through some of his current favourite things.